choice

Wife: “Don’t forget we’re going to my parents this weekend to help them with that project.”Husband: “What project?”Wife: “Remember, they’re redoing their living room, and we have to help them move all the furniture and repaint.”Husband: “You didn’t tell me we were doing that this weekend!”Wife: “Yes I did. I told you Wednesday, when we were coming home from church.”Husband: “I didn’t think you were talking about this weekend!”Wife: “I swear you have a selective memory. You only remember what you want to remember!”

Sound familiar? The particulars of the conversation may be different, but most of us have experienced similar conversations.

Computer viruses are maddening. When a virus gets into your computer, it changes the way your computer operates. All of a sudden the computer doesn’t work as smoothly as it use to. It gets sluggish, acts erratically and sometimes just shuts down.

Marriages, like computers, are susceptible to viruses that can effect the health and operation of the marriage. Here’s how it works…

Think of something you just don’t want to do. Maybe it’s cleaning the garage or organizing your closet. Perhaps it’s giving the dog a bath or cleaning the bathroom. It could be cleaning the gutters or working on your taxes. Or maybe it’s that mammogram or colonoscopy you’re avoiding like the plague.

We all have things we don’t want to do. We put them off, because they’re no fun.

Likewise, there are things in marriage we don’t like to do, so we put them off. Things like:

Have you ever regretted something, and the more you thought about it the more you found yourself saying, “If only”? Maybe it was something you said, or something you did, or a decision you made, but whatever it was left you with regret and the reverberation of “if only.”

We just put our Christmas decorations up…five days before Christmas! No, we’re not Scrooges and no, this is not typical for us.

We were going to have the decorations up three weeks before Christmas, but that week turned out to be more demanding than we expected. (Don’t they all?) We did stick a naked tree in a stand that week, but that’s as far as we got. Then my wife got sick a few days after that and has been sick ever since. So all we had was a naked tree in a stand five days before Christmas.

Some of the best marriage advice I’ve ever received came from Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. (For those who don’t know, The Grateful Dead is a psychedelic rock band that came to fame in the midst of the drug culture of the 60’s.) In Garcia’s self-titled 1972 solo album, a song entitled “Deal” contained the following lyric…

“Since it costs a lot to win, and even more to lose, you and me got to spend some time wondering what to choose.”

When you apply this line to marriage, it’s some of the best advice you’ll find, because it reminds us…

It was a normal evening, and I had no idea what was about to happen. My daughter was playing on the floor in the living room and I was helping my wife get dinner on the table. I had just put a bake potato on a plate when suddenly it happened.